Sad news today that comic artist Carlos Ezquerra has died, aged 70. His amazing work, especially in 2000AD, formed one of the foundation stones on which I built my ambition to be a comics artist. Like Colquhoun, Bolland, McMahon, Smith, O'Neill and others, his art seeped into my consciousness and never left.

His body of work was incredible in both quality and scope, and I would have been reading his strips in various British weeklies long before I knew who he was. He designed Judge Dredd, and became one of the character's cardinal draughtsmen. The first strip of his I became obsessed with was Strontium Dog: Portrait of a Mutant (1981), and the next was Judge Dredd: the Apocalypse War (1982), both classics that have stood the test of time. I read and re-read those stories, and examined his art until I could conjure up many of his iconic images at will, enjoying them again in my mind's eye rather than concentrating on the maths I was supposed to be doing at school. Every line he drew crackled with energy and every panel jolted the story into vivid life.